Cambridge University Press

978-1-107-66739-6 - Cambridge Discovery EducationTM: Interactive Readers: The Wheel: A2+

Caroline Shackleton and Nathan Paul Turner
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CHAPTER 1

Inventing the Wheel

IT’S A MAN-MADE INVENTION, IT HAS COMPLETELY
CHANGED THE WAY WE LIVE, AND IT’S EVERYWHERE
IN THE WORLD. WHAT IS IT? THE WHEEL!

Wheels are all around us. You use them every day,
but you probably don’t think about them very often. In
fact, the wheel as we know it is quite a new invention.
There are no real wheels in nature. There aren’t any
animals that use wheels to get around. But why not?
Why are there no animals with wheels instead of legs?
Perhaps because wheels aren’t any good on some kinds
of ground. It’s hard to cross the desert or the forest or to
climb a mountain on wheels. However, for humans, the
wheel has been an amazing invention.

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Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-66739-6 - Cambridge Discovery EducationTM: Interactive Readers: The Wheel: A2+
Caroline Shackleton and Nathan Paul Turner
Excerpt
More information

If there are no wheels in nature, how did people first

make them? Nobody really knows the answer. There
are many round shapes and circles in nature, but they
aren’t like wheels; they aren’t used to help move things.
The earliest people worked with stone. So, maybe
they saw round stones rolling. But they also made boats
from wood. Perhaps they saw the logs they used for
building boats rolling down a hill!
One of the earliest uses of logs to move things was
in Egypt about 3000 BCE. Logs were used to build the
pyramids. The heavy stones for these buildings were
put on flat sleds and pulled forward over logs, called
rollers. The rolling logs helped move the stones more
easily.

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Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-66739-6 - Cambridge Discovery EducationTM: Interactive Readers: The Wheel: A2+
Caroline Shackleton and Nathan Paul Turner
Excerpt
More information

The first wheels were solid wood.

The first real wheels were probably made in

Mesopotamia, now Iraq. But scientists think that those
first wheels were not used for moving a vehicle. They
were used in pottery wheels. These machines turned
quickly in a circle to help people make things like cups
and bowls. Another early wheel, a millstone, was a
heavy, round stone. It was used for breaking down
plants for cooking and for making flour.1
The earliest pictures of wheels on vehicles are on
Mesopotamian paintings from 3000–2700 BCE. These
wheels were made of solid2 wood and turned on a
simple axle. Around 2000 BCE the Egyptians started
using spokes on their chariot wheels. These wheels
needed less wood, so they were cheaper to make. They
were also much lighter and could travel faster.
1
flour: used to make bread, cakes, etc.
2
solid: without any holes or openings
8

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Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-66739-6 - Cambridge Discovery EducationTM: Interactive Readers: The Wheel: A2+
Caroline Shackleton and Nathan Paul Turner
Excerpt
More information

The wheel was soon used by different groups of

people across Europe and Asia. By 500 BCE, many types
of wheeled vehicles were in use, from fast chariots to
large, slow carts.3 The wheels they used are much like
the wheels we use today.
However, in other places in the
world, wheels were never used.
Central and South American peoples,
like the Mayans or Incas, built
amazing cities and temples without
using wheels. Nobody knows why,
but it may be because they lived in
mountainous areas, where it was A Mayan temple
impossible to use wheeled vehicles.
Wheels are no good in high mountains, in deep
snow, or in desert sands. Even today in the Sahara
desert, animals like the camel are more useful than
wheeled vehicles.
3
cart: a vehicle with two or four wheels that is pushed by a person or
pulled by an animal
4
all-terrain vehicle: a vehicle that can travel on many different kinds of
ground

Video Quest
Legs or Wheels: part 1
Watch this video about some
men trying to make a new kind
of all-terrain vehicle.4 What is the
idea behind the new invention?

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Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-66739-6 - Cambridge Discovery EducationTM: Interactive Readers: The Wheel: A2+
Caroline Shackleton and Nathan Paul Turner
Excerpt
More information

CHAPTER 2

Making Wheels
Work
THE WHEEL IS BEST KNOWN FOR ITS USE IN
VEHICLES, BUT IT WAS FIRST USED IN INDUSTRY.

Throughout history machines have used wheels.

And for a long time wheels also made machines work.
The first wheel used for power was the waterwheel.
This was a great improvement in technology because it
let people use running water to power machines instead
of using animals or other people.
The first waterwheel we know about was in a flour
mill in Byzantium, now Turkey. The first waterwheels
lay on their sides. But by 240 CE, in Alexandria in
Egypt, people were using wheels that stood up in rivers
and were much more powerful.

10

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978-1-107-66739-6 - Cambridge Discovery EducationTM: Interactive Readers: The Wheel: A2+
Caroline Shackleton and Nathan Paul Turner
Excerpt
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To use waterwheels to drive machines, people

needed a way to send the power from the turning
wheel to the things they wanted to work on. They used
more wheels! They found that if you cut teeth into two
wheels and put them together, the first wheel turns the
second one.
As early as 330 BCE, the Greek inventor Archimedes
talked about toothed wheels, called gears. He realized
that when the teeth from the first wheel push the second,
the second wheel turns in the opposite direction. But a
third wheel moves opposite to the second, in the same
direction as the first one. By putting gears together, you
can send the power from a waterwheel to a machine. The
Greeks used gears to make complicated mechanisms5
like clocks.
5
mechanism: one part of a machine that does a special job

11

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Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-66739-6 - Cambridge Discovery EducationTM: Interactive Readers: The Wheel: A2+
Caroline Shackleton and Nathan Paul Turner
Excerpt
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Drawing of the
Antikythera
Mechanism

Perhaps the most complicated early use of gears that

we know about is the Antikythera Mechanism. It was
found under the sea in a shipwreck6 near the Greek Island
of Antikythera in 1901. There was a case with instructions
in Greek, 30 gears, and 82 pieces made of the metal bronze.
Scientists thought that these pieces were part of
a very complicated kind of clock, but it took them
almost 100 years to put the pieces together! In fact, the
Antikythera was a planetarium, a machine that shows
the movements of the planets7 and the moon around
the sun. It was actually a kind of calendar. It showed
scientists that the ancient world had complicated
technology and knew a lot about space.
6
shipwreck: a ship that sank in an accident
7
planets: very big, round things, like Earth, that move around a star
12

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Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-66739-6 - Cambridge Discovery EducationTM: Interactive Readers: The Wheel: A2+
Caroline Shackleton and Nathan Paul Turner
Excerpt
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Another important wheel

for industry was the windmill.
Windmills use sails to catch the wind
and make power. Unfortunately,
windmills only work if it’s windy!
But they have one great advantage.
Waterwheels need rivers, but you
can build a windmill anywhere that’s
windy. Modern windmills, called
wind turbines, are used as a clean
way to make electricity. A windmill with sails
Finally, steam power, the key
to the Industrial Revolution,8 also
used the wheel. Steam from boiling
water moved wheels and powered
machines. From the 17th century,
steam power was seen more and
more in mills and factories. By the
19th century, steam was powering
the new trains and ships and driving
forward trade9 and industry. The age
of industrial power had begun!
A steam engine
8
Industrial Revolution: the time in history when machines in big
factories started doing a lot of work
9
trade: buying and selling things

UNDERSTAND
Describe two ways wheels were used
in the past.

13

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Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-66739-6 - Cambridge Discovery EducationTM: Interactive Readers: The Wheel: A2+
Caroline Shackleton and Nathan Paul Turner
Excerpt
More information

A bucket wheel excavator moving earth

CHAPTER 3

A World Full
of Wheels!
WE SEE WHEELS EVERYWHERE WE LOOK.

Wheels make modern transportation possible. There

are big wheels, small wheels, fast wheels, slow wheels.
Let’s take a look at some facts about wheels, and some
of the inventions that have made them better.

Small wheels
The smallest motor vehicle you can drive on a road
is the Peel P50. It was first built in the 1960s on the Isle
of Man between England and Ireland, but only 50 were
made. The P50 had only three wheels, was very light,
and had just one front light and one door. It could only
drive forward. If you wanted to go backward, you had
to pull it by hand. But it was small enough to keep in
your house!

14

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978-1-107-66739-6 - Cambridge Discovery EducationTM: Interactive Readers: The Wheel: A2+
Caroline Shackleton and Nathan Paul Turner
Excerpt
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An articulated truck

Big wheels
The biggest vehicle in the world is the bucket-wheel
excavator. These machines use very big wheels to move
large pieces of earth. The biggest, the Bagger 293, is 96
meters tall and 225 meters long, and it weighs 142,000
kilograms! Its wheel is 21 meters across! But it can only
move very slowly, traveling just half a kilometer an hour!

Lots of wheels
The road vehicle with the most wheels is the
articulated truck. These big, heavy vehicles carry food,
animals, gas, and many other things. They often have
five axles and eighteen wheels and are sometimes
known as 18-wheelers. Only the front two wheels
are like the wheels on a normal car. The other sixteen
wheels sit in pairs on four of the axles. This makes the
vehicle safer.
15

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